Foil Stamping With Letterpress Photopolymer Plates | Will It Work??
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ก.ค. 2024
- 00:00 Intro
01:12 Photopolymer plate overview
03:24 Exposing photopolymer plate
04:31 Washing & curing photopolymer plate
05:10 Fixing plate to press with die bond tape
06:35 Test printing
08:27 Metal backed photopolymer plate overview
09:25 Test printing
11:23 Conclusions
Foil Stamping is something I've long loved to incorporate into my designs and this year I managed to get hold of my own hot foil press! Which means it's time to start experimenting with how I am going to transfer my own designs into a die.
Photopolymer is one method that I have seen work and today I'm going to be experimenting with some Toyobo Photopolymer plates to see if you can foil with them.
Special thanks to Lyme Bay Press for all the help - main.lymebaypress.co.uk/
Die Bond Tape (sold by the meter) - hotfoiluk.com/product/block-m...
Reddit /r/printmaking discord channel - / discord
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One thing that comes to mind while watching you experiment is the material you are using to hold down the items being exposed. It's a fuzzy memory, but when I did photofabbed PCB's many years ago, I remember I ran into a problem of using a clear sheet that ended up absorbing a good deal of the necessary wavelength of my UV light source. I don't recall if it was acrylic, polycarbonate, or glass - but one of them caused issues. I had just figured clear was clear. Keep at it - you'll work it out through methodical testing. Just try not to change too many variables at once.
hi john, yes I believe this is a low iron glass pane so it should let through the UV, I also did one test strip in direct sunlight and the result were pretty much the same so im think its probably isnt the glass
Hi there, I never tried hot press foil printing but I learned about flexography on University. What you are holding looks to me like a flexographic printing plate, in industry they are used for printing on foils (usually for food packaging). So I want to share few ideas and thoughts:
- I learned that here are 2 exposing time, one is for making you design (the one you did), other one is for hardening the plate. They also said that after the washing you can feel the plate is sticky and it means it's not hardened totally. So my suggestion is to do the second exposure after drying, but I'm not sure for how long (if you are interested I can try to find it out). And you do the second exposure without the foil with design, so that light can reach all the parts.
- Other suggestion is to wait for 24h before printing, because it needs a lot of time to fully dry and stabilize.
- On my practical felxography lessons we used hairdryer and towels to dry the plates faster.
- Are you sure you have the right light? I remember that flexo plates were really sensitive and that wavelengths were very important to match with the specification of the producers.
- We never mentioned in the class that you can use flexography plates for hot foil press, so this makes me skeptical that it can handle 150C. I think that in print the plates shouldn't get hotter than 40-60C, and probably are not designed for higher temperatures. This is my guess.
- Based on your exposure test strip the end result looks odd to me. At 05:02 your strip looks completely flat, instead it should have variable relief densities. Like here:
c8.alamy.com/comp/R44NMA/printing-plate-for-flexographic-printing-with-magnifying-glass-isolated-on-white-background-with-shadow-reflection-test-print-plate-with-various-rast-R44NMA.jpg
So to me it looks like it's underexposed.
- I know that you mentioned in your previous video that one of solutions for you to make your dies is to use chemical etching process. To me this sounds way easier with bigger chance to make it work and it's possible to do it DIY at home.
Hope this things helped you. I really like your channel and would like to see what will make out of the hot press! Keep up good work! :)
Vanja thanks so much for sharing all this info
Im definitely going to leave a few test strips overnight to dry and cure because i'm sure my test strips havent cured enough from these experiments.
Light - yes i think Im at the end of the spectrum that is recommended, we have some really nice sunny days here in UK this week so I will leave outside to expose.
I will check the densities for the exposure strip next time and hopefully they will have different heights according to the light level.
My first chemical etching experiments will be up on TH-cam later this week so be sure to keep an eye out for the video :)
@@ThisDesignedThat "I will check the densities for the exposure strip next time and hopefully they will have different heights according to the light level."
Actually they should have the same height, but the density of the raster elements should vary. The printing surface (the one that is carrying your design) that is pressing the foil should be flat. See this image:
www.flexotechmag.com/media/137453/rsz_drops.jpg
This is a microscope image of flexo plate ready for printing, it have hills with flat tops. Those tops are printing elements. So the position of the hills stays the same but the diameter of the tops vary. This is how half tone works with flexography.
Other thing, I'm not sure that you can get half tone effect (or lets say transparency or gradient effect) with foil stamping at all. When I was printing business cards with foil stamping the printer told me I shouldn't make elements smaller than 1mm. (which is too big for raster dots in half tone to begin with).
I would rather make a test strip with different font sizes and different line thicknesses, that seems more relevant for you in this moment.
And I would suggest again to try exposing the plate for the second time after the washing and drying, this can help with the hardness of the plate.
Hi! I do order some things from lymebay Lisa aswell , but as she recentry showed- photopolymer will not get that crisp finish as metal ones does. But for experiments- keep up! ;)
Hey mate i wanted to know where did you purchased your foil press?
Second hand from Ebay. Not sure where you are based but in UK there are many of these presses available on ebay
hey mate have you made research and any update on this product? can we use it as a stamping die/plate?
So it will work but you need to really dry out the polymer after exposing to get it as hard as possible, any moisture left over in the polymer will cause it to break down like what you see in this video. I have a CNC machine now and machine my own stamping dies from metal so I no longer need to use this method but it is definitely possible
@@ThisDesignedThat thanks for the reply and information, we are also doing etching process on metal for hot foil stamping and embossing as well. We are also manufacturer of microcrystalize etching plates and chemicles.in case you need 😀